The British can be “oddly provincial in outlook” when it comes to literature, the writer and academic Marina Warner is due to say, as she calls for more translations to be made of literature from India, China and across the Arab world.

Warner, fresh from chairing the panel of judges that selected Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai as winner of the £60,000 Man Booker International prize, is set to give a public lecture at Birkbeck University on Tuesday evening exploring the nature of global fiction, and the dominance of English.

Pointing to a recent report which found that just 3% of books published in the UK were in translation – an “embarrassingly low” figure according to Literature Across Frontiers director Alexandra Büchler – Warner is due to say that this is “far lower than other countries”, with all 10 writers on the Man Booker International shortlist translated into German, French and Italian “far more swiftly” than they were into English.

“Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook,” she will say, as she reflects on the two years she has spent reading fiction from around the world to judge the Man Booker International. “I also felt, anecdotally, that women were faring worse. Some leading figures, such as Linda Lê and Francoise Chandernagor, whose books I would see reviewed in full-page articles in Le Monde, have not made the passage into English; nor have Melania G Mazzucco from Italy and Elena Poniatowska from Mexico had enough titles published in English, though their work was much recommended as we made our soundings. So against all expectation, the world in world literature still occupies a narrow berth.”

She and her fellow judges, she will say in a lecture entitled Translumination or travesty?: The Passage into English, “all wanted to move out across the map of the world and listen in to many voices on wavelengths our systems don’t pick up, in this country, very attentively”.

“The big commercial metropoles can be extremely provincial in their outlook, and several of the writers we read are nomadic, willingly or unwillingly part of the contemporary world’s diasporas, while imaginatively, they inhabit places far and wide besides those which the body occupies or birth allotted,” she will say. “The novel is a free arena – or at least, the most open arena available in many places during an era of oppressive regimes.”

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She will say that the writers on the Man Booker International shortlist, who ranged from the Guadeloupian Maryse Condé to the Congolese Alain Mabanckou, have “found translators and brave small publishing houses and enterprising digital platforms … where they can now make their voices heard, beyond their own language and its restrictions, political and other”. But she and her fellow judges wanted to include “many more”.

“One of the main causes for past failures of translated fiction to emerge as the winner in the MBI has been the absence of cultural transmission at this level. When Carmen Callil was a judge she found over and over again that the translators were not writing well in English. That was in 2011 when Philip Roth won it, the second North American, after Alice Munro, and he would be followed by Lydia Davis two years ago,” Warner will say.

But while the mythographer and professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck feels that, this year, those authors writing in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese and French were not placed at such a disadvantage because the languages they are using “have a very strong tradition already … major world languages abundantly alive in other parts of the world – India, China, and the Arabic used all over the Arab world – have a more meagre legacy of translation”.

“Consequently less flows from their literature … the wake of the literature in which new translators are bobbing is weaker.”

“But it is the reason more translations are needed: the more works make the passage into English, the better will be the results, as one instrument picks up from another to create that region’s music, as it sounds when played in English,” she will say.

Warner and her fellow judges Nadeem Aslam, Elleke Boehmer, Edwin Frank and Wen-chin Ouyang have considered work from all over the world for the Man Booker International, which goes to a living author for their body of work, either originally published in English, or “generally” available in translation. This year, Hungarian Krasznahorkai was chosen as winner from a 10-strong shortlist, which also featured Condé, Mabanckou, Mia Couto from Mozambique, Ibrahim al-Koni from Libya, Marlene van Niekerk from South Africa, India’s Amitav Ghosh, Lebanon’s Hoda Barakat, Argentina’s César Aira and America’s Fanny Howe.